Rosario Dawson defends stars at WHCD

Do celebrities belong at the White House Correspondents' Dinner? Maybe not, but the stars aren't crashing the party, says actress Rosario Dawson.

On whether the Washington dinner has been overrun by Hollywood types, Dawson — who attended the event last month — said in an interview with POLITICO. “These people aren’t just showing up on their own. They’re being invited and they’re guests.”

“You know, it’s so funny I was talking to someone who asked why Woody Harrelson was there and he said, ‘I’ve got three words for you: I was invited,’” Dawson, best known for her roles in “Sin City” and “Men in Black II,” said “and that’s the way this country and a lot of media works: When you have someone there that’s recognizable it brings attention. All these different news groups cover celebrities all the time so it’s not like it totally doesn’t make any sense.”

A few days ago, veteran journalist Tom Brokaw criticized the Correspondents’ Dinner, remarking that the “glittering,” star-studded event “has gone way too far.” But for some stars, like Dawson, it’s not just a see-and-be-seen affair. And the presumption that celebs are just, well, celebs, is offensive.

“A lot of the people who do go down there are very much civically participatory,” she said. One cause that Dawson has espoused, she told us, is the importance of train travel. The actress, who's a spokeswoman for Amtrak’s National Train Day — a multicity celebration of train travel — this weekend, explained, “When you have 30 million people who used trains last year alone, imagine all those people in cars and what that would do carbon-footprint-wise — it's crazy.”

“But really, for me, I’ve been going down there all of these years because I have a voting organization,” she said, explaining that she's gone to the dinner under both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Dawson’s advocacy group, Voto Latino, which she co-founded in 2004, is focused on empowering Latinos to get involved politically. “Our country is going in the wrong direction if we don’t start talking about Latino issues as American issues,” she said. “…Right now, they’re disproportionately affected in such a negative way, that if that’s the population that’s going to take over this country, we’re going to be in really poor shape.”

So who’s Dawson supporting in 2012, President Barack Obama or the presumed Republican nominee, Mitt Romney? She wouldn’t say. “I’m not taking sides” she said. “What I’m more curious about is the voter and how accessible it is for them to be enfranchised.”